George Cordoyiannis, PhD from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics F5 and colleagues from Belgium and Denmark have published inPhysica Status Solidi A the review article QCM-D Study of the Formation of Solid-Supported Artificial Lipid Membranes: State-of-the-Art, Recent Advances, and Perspectives.

An overview of the lipid vesicle adsorption and rupture under different experimental conditions is given. The current understanding of the mechanisms relies on surface sensitive techniques, such as quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring and atomic force microscopy. We provide various examples how the vesicle adsorption and rupture are influenced by varying the lipid size and charge, the type of buffer and the adhesion strength of solid substrate.

George Cordoyiannis, PhD from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics F5 and colleagues from Belgium and UK have published in Physical Review E the article Phase transitions study of the liquid crystal DIO with a ferroelectric nematic, a nematic, and an intermediate phase and of mixtures with the ferroelectric nematic compound RM734 by adiabatic scanning calorimetry.

We have studied phase transitions in a series of mixtures of liquid crystals RM734 and DIO exhibiting new types of ferroelectric nematic phases. RM734 exhibits a nematic (N) and a ferroelectric nematic (N_F) phase, whereas DIO has an intermediate phase (N_x) between N and N_F. By means of high-resolution calorimetry, we have derived the precise phase diagram as a function of mixture composition, i.e., as a function of variable ferroelectric coupling. The phase diagram is consistent with ideal mixture behavior, provided that the total enthalpy values are used in the analysis. The critical behavior of N_x-N_F phase transition exhibited by the mixtures shows a systematic trend of the critical exponent values from α = 0.88 ± 0.10 for DIO towards α = 0.50 ± 0.05 (tricritical) when increasing the concentration of RM734.